Being a pastor within the secular frame means teaching people how to pray

It’s rare that a cutting-edge scientific research project needs a person in a gorilla suit, but so it was for Daniel Simons’s experiment in attention blindness. Simons, who teaches at the University of Illinois, is a researcher in a field of psychology called visual cognition. His best-known experiment—which can be seen on YouTube—is popularly called “the invisible gorilla.”

The idea behind the experiment is simple. People tend to think—particularly in this secular age—that seeing is believing. For instance, you’d assume that if you were watching people walking in a circle passing a basketball, you’d notice if some dude in a gorilla suit randomly walked through the scene, waving his arms and jumping up and down. That can’t be missed. Yet half the participants in Simons’s experiment miss it. People assume at rates over 90 percent that they are not the kind of people to miss such an obvious, right-in-front-of-your-face event—and yet 50 percent do.

The experiment shows that if people are looking for a gorilla, they see a gorilla. But if your attention is elsewhere—for instance, on counting the number of times the basketball is passed—at least half will miss the interloper.